Content is a powerful tool to showcase your employer brand and attract the right talent to your organization. But how can you align your content with your employer branding strategy and ensure consistency, relevance, and impact? Here are some steps you can follow to create and optimize your employer branding content.
Your employer value proposition (EVP) is the core message that summarizes why people should work for you and what makes you different from other employers. It should reflect your mission, vision, values, culture, and benefits. To define your EVP, you need to conduct internal and external research, analyze your strengths and weaknesses, and identify your target audience and their needs. Your EVP should be clear, compelling, and authentic.
In our workplace, we embarked on a transformative journey to craft our unique Employer Value Proposition (EVP), a process that went far beyond strategy and words. Our EVP, we discovered, was the heart and soul of our organization, a concise yet powerful message that encapsulated why talented individuals should choose us over others. It was an intimate journey of self-discovery, peeling the layers of our mission, vision, values, culture, and the tangible benefits we offered to our employees.
Once you have your EVP, you need to evaluate your existing content and see how well it aligns with your employer branding strategy. You can conduct a content audit to assess the quality, quantity, and performance of your content across different channels and platforms. A content audit can help you identify gaps, opportunities, and areas for improvement. You can use a spreadsheet or a tool to document your findings and recommendations.
One time at work, I was filled with enthusiasm as we introduced our compelling Employer Value Proposition (EVP), encapsulating our organization's unique identity. However, the real challenge lay in aligning our content with this newfound essence. In my experience, our content felt disconnected, merely a collection of words on paper. This is when the value of content auditing became clear. Our content audit revealed a mix of strengths and shortcomings, highlighting pieces that resonated with our EVP and others that required attention. Remember, your own content journey begins with this realization, turning your EVP into the guiding force that breathes life into every word and image you share.
As a Branding expert or Content Strategist, assessing the current content of the client is crucial. It includes not just the website content, but social media posts, annual reports, marketing materials, and any other content that has been put out in the public domain by the company. The key idea is to understand their branding strategy so far and what needs improvement. Look for inconsistencies, outdated information or content that doesn’t reflect the desired brand image.
Based on your content audit, you can create a content plan that outlines your goals, objectives, key messages, topics, formats, channels, and metrics for your employer branding content. Your content plan should align with your EVP and support your recruitment and retention goals. You should also consider your content lifecycle and how you will create, distribute, manage, and update your content.
Understand the client’s branding goals and their target audience to guide the content’s tone, style and topics. Identify the key themes and messages that align with their branding strategy and what makes the brand unique. Decide the type of content channels and platforms that will be used to reach the target audience. Create a content calendar that outlines when and how often content will be published and establish the KPIs to track the success of your content plan – set a time-frame to revisit this plan if the performance falls short of the desired level.
To produce engaging and relevant content, you need to understand your audience and their pain points, motivations, and expectations. You need to create content that showcases your employer brand personality, values, and culture, and that answers their questions and concerns. You should also use storytelling techniques, visuals, and testimonials to make your content more human and relatable. You can use different formats and channels to reach your audience, such as blogs, podcasts, videos, social media, webinars, newsletters, etc.
Consistency is key. Ensure that the content reflects the values and messaging that the client wants to convey, and at the same time, amplify the brand’s unique selling points. Storytelling is usually the best way to engage an audience. Craft narratives which resonate with your target audience, be it in the form of educational content, problem-solving or entertainment. Also, visual elements are a must! Even stock images from Unsplash, Getty Images, etc, would do. And Infographics, (try Canva, it's really easy) will do wonders, if storytelling is not possible.
To ensure that your content reaches and attracts your ideal candidates, you need to optimize it for search engines and user experience. You need to use relevant keywords, titles, headings, meta descriptions, and links to improve your content visibility and ranking. You also need to use clear, concise, and consistent language, design, and layout to enhance your content readability and usability. You should also test your content for different devices, browsers, and accessibility.
To evaluate the effectiveness of your content and your employer branding strategy, you need to measure and improve your content performance. You need to use analytics tools and data to track and analyze your content metrics, such as traffic, engagement, conversion, retention, etc. You should also collect feedback from your audience and stakeholders to understand their satisfaction and perception of your employer brand. You should use your insights and learnings to optimize and update your content and strategy.
In our journey to fortify our employer brand, we found that measurement was our compass. We tracked data like website traffic and engagement but also valued feedback from our audience. These insights became our lighthouse, guiding us to optimize our content continuously. It's not just about numbers; it's about a commitment to delivering content that resonates with our audience and mirrors our evolving employer branding strategy. Our story is about the ever-evolving nature of employer branding, where improvement isn't a destination, but the very path we walk.